During flight, pilots rely on various onboard sensory data sources to make decisions for a continuous and safer flight, ensuring a better flying experience for passengers. Weather along the flight path, runway conditions, or other parameters, are dynamic in nature, and having knowledge of such parameters becomes essential for a safer and secure flight. Onboard sensory data is essential for pilots in making decisions so as to have a continuous and safe flight. For example, some aircraft are equipped with onboard weather radar to aid the pilot in understanding the weather conditions prevailing along a flight path. This helps the pilot to make critical decisions in altering the course of flight to avoid bad weather prevailing along the flight path.
State of the art onboard weather radars are capable of detecting weather only up to about 320 nautical miles (nmi). There are some aircrafts that fly without any onboard weather radar. Attributing to these deficiencies, pilots may at times fly through areas where bad weather prevails (e.g., turbulence zones). In other scenarios, when a pilot lands an aircraft on a wet runway, the aircraft can experience slipping and skidding. Some of these instances can lead to either passenger discomfort, or may even cause severe damage to both passengers as well as the structure of the aircraft.
Accordingly, it would be useful from an information perspective, to provide any trailing aircraft, or other aircraft that would potentially be flying into the same area, with weather or other data in advance.
While not of a safety-critical nature, ensuring in-flight connectivity is another parameter that would enable a better passenger flight experience. For example, it would be useful to have flight paths defined in such a way that in-flight connectivity can be guaranteed through the course of flight.